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Work Stuff

I’ve been hitting the work stuff hard lately. I’m working on this awesome click tracking system which will tell me a lot about outgoing (ie, affiliate) clicks on a bunch of our websites. Basically I’ll be able to find out a lot about which countries are doing the best, which operating systems do the best, etc. It will also allow me to do a lot of a/b testing to figure out which sorts of things are converting at the best rates. While I’m doing this for a specific site of ours (a site that 99% of you have never even heard of), it will be applied to a bunch of sites of ours and I think it’s going to make us a lot of additional money in the long-run if we apply it correctly.

I’ve also been working with a new employee of ours on Poker Terms. The site is starting to get some real traction in terms of traffic and in the search engines. The new employee is a long-time P5er who we hired and he moved to Costa Rica. He’s still new to a bunch of the things we do in our company (ie, search engine optimization) but he’s got a lot of poker knowledge. That alone puts him way ahead of the curve for most people who we would consider hiring. Being a good writer, smart, dedicated and poker-savvy is like 95% of being a really valuable employee for us. I think we’re all hoping that he can eventually take over running some of our sites so this is really the beginning of the training process. It’s hard sometimes because I’m in Cayman and he’s in Costa Rica but I think we’re making good progress so I’m excited about that. I’m also excited about what Poker Terms can become over the next six months or so.

Lastly, I found out that we’re going to be doing a major redesign of PocketFives. I’m also going to be more involved at the site than I’ve been over the last few years. I’m excited about this because I think it’ll give me a chance to reconnect with the online community that I’ve gotten more and more disconnected from over time. While I still have tons of friends in poker and poker stuff is my day-to-day life, I don’t have the same connection with the best online poker players in the world. I look forward to getting back into that world and doing some really cool things with P5s.

As part of my job to get back involved at PocketFives, I’ve spent a lot more time reading the boards than I normally do. There are a lot of issues out there that I don’t really feel connected with. Things like people being upset with Bodog aren’t new. That will probably never change because I don’t really think Bodog cares about doing what poker players really want to see. At least not to the same level that sites like Stars, FTP, UB, etc are willing to do to get the poker players in the door and playing. Obviously they do have some decent online poker tournaments but they will never get big until they allow interaccount transfers and get a professional in there to make a real tournament schedule and promote the crap out of it.

Anyway, enough Bodog talk. The point is that some things are old and some things are issues I’ve never really dealt with. Like all of the deposit and bounced check issues that people seem to be having are pretty foreign to me. My heavy poker playing days occurred in the Neteller and Firepay days. And even though I played a bit after the Neteller thing I never had to deal with any of the EWallets or anything like that. I need to really re-familiarize myself with contemporary online poker issues, complaints, players, etc. It’s going to take me some time to get involved again but it’s a challenge that I look forward to.

This weekend, I’m off to Athens, GA to see the Auburn game with yellowsub86 and co. I’m also going to visit with the Bluff guys in Atlanta and to pick up some stuff from the states which I can’t buy in Cayman.